Federal probe could prompt long overdue death of amateurism

Since former Rick Pitino is gone from Louisville, the city’s pro basketball chances might escalate.

Since former Rick Pitino is gone from Louisville, the city’s pro...

Amateurism will be dead someday, and perhaps soon. Do not mourn its passing.

It is cause for celebration.

The Department of Justice, intentionally or not, is killing the very concept that holds the NCAA together. Before we know it, the entire college sports apparatus will need to transform itself, or risk extinction.

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Granted, all of the time and resources that federal investigators devoted to a two-year probe of what U.S. Attorney Joon Kim called “the dark underbelly of college basketball” probably could have been better spent elsewhere. These, after all, are not exactly high crimes.

But in proving what almost all of us already knew — that artificially restricting a marketplace inevitably leads to widespread corruption — the feds are presenting college sports with a clear choice:

Admit that the idea of amateurism in a billion-dollar industry is both fundamentally unfair and preposterously absurd, or stick with it and ensure that the arrests and scandals keep coming.

Now, before you send all of your predictable responses — “The players get scholarships!” “Small schools can’t afford to pay them!” “What about Title IX?” — let us be clear. No one is suggesting that college players all of a sudden will or should put their football team on payroll tomorrow.

Instead, the simplest solution is the same one it always has been — to treat college athletes like everyone else in America, and allow them to capitalize on their market value in any way they see fit.

If a shoe company thinks enough of a young basketball prospect to give assistant coaches kickbacks for steering them to certain programs — as alleged in the government’s case — why not allow that company to pay the kid directly?

If a track athlete has a popular YouTube channel that fans and advertisers are willing to turn into a profitable enterprise, why prevent that from happening?

And if a rich booster wants to pay the starting linebacker to mow his grass, or wash his car, or just to sign an autograph, why should anyone stop him?

That, dear readers, is capitalism. And it never ceases to be amazing that those who preach the gospel of the free market in every other corner of American life tend to make an exception when it comes to the college kids they cheer for on Saturdays.

When anyone dares bring up the idea of the Olympic model — in which participants don’t receive a salary but are free to be paid for endorsements and profit from their own names and likenesses — the college traditionalists’ conniptions begin.

“If you let college kids have sponsorship deals, boosters will abuse it!”

“If a recruit can go where he will get paid the most, only the biggest schools will have a chance to win championships!”

“If players are making money from this, it won’t be about academics anymore!”

As if any of those three observations aren’t already true. Does anyone think boosters aren’t already involved in this? That more than a few major programs have a chance to win? That big-time college athletics have anything to do with education?

Of course not.

We have known all of this for years, but we never had the subpoena power or the threat of prosecution to make it as clear as the feds did this week. So now, with four college basketball assistants arrested and the threat of this investigation expanding to more shoe companies and more high-profile college superpowers, it will become clearer by the day.

Amateurism was a ruse, a con, a bedtime fairy tale that helped people who wanted to believe in the sanctity of college sports sleep better at night.